Prosecco Can Age. Who Knew?

With a lot of curiosity and an only slightly smaller amount of skepticism, I last month accepted an invitation to a vertical tasting of Prosecco, a wine that is usually drunk young and fresh. The producer so bravely putting himself and his wine on the line was Primo Franco, owner of the Nino Franco winery (Nino was his grandfather) in Valdobbiadene, the heart of the heart of classic Prosecco country.

I knew his wines to be excellent examples of the breed, with charm and elegance and fruit and an ever-so-slight hint of sweetness in the finish – lovely Proseccos, all of them, and I and a lot of other wine professionals regard his Prosecco Rustico as one of the best bargains in sparkling wine of any kind from anywhere.

And since I also knew him to be a serious winemaker, devoted to the highest standards of quality in the field, the cellar, and the bottle, my curiosity easily trumped my skepticism, so there I sat waiting to taste library samples of his Prosecco Primo Franco DOCG 2013, 2003, 2000, 1997, 1995, 1992, and 1989.

Seeing the projected lineup of wines, my skepticism had a little resurgence. 2003 was a wet, wet year all over Italy, and disastrously so in some regions. 2000 was hot, very hot, everywhere, producing a lot of wines that feature both over-ripe fruit and under-ripe tannins – not the best combination for a sparkling wine of elegance and charm. 1997 was superb in Tuscany, OK in Piedmont, and not so good further to the northeast. ’95 I couldn’t really recall, but I was pretty sure that ’92 hadn’t made distinguished wine anywhere.

All these forebodings were reinforced by Primo himself, who in his preliminary remarks said that all the vintages he was showing had been very difficult – too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry – and (this confounded me) they had been chosen to be shown after he had tasted through some 30 consecutive vintages in his own cellar. We have got here, I thought to myself, either a brave man and a master winemaker or a complete lunatic. An hour later, it was very clear he wasn’t even a partial lunatic.

So here’s the short story: The 1989 was a little disappointing, showing a perceptible tad of oxidation – not a bad wine by any means, but a come-down from the superb standard that had been set by the other six vintages. Primo felt this was bottle variation: “Not the best bottle of this vintage” he had tasted recently, he said.

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Those other six bottles were across the board textbook top-of-the-line Prosecco, delightful to drink and fresh even at over 20 years old. Indeed, I was amazed at how consistently, through the whole lineup, aromas of honey, smoke, and acacia flowers persisted, how the palate deepened and intensified ever so slightly from vintage to vintage, how it preserved always the hints of spice and dried apricot and slate, the elegance and appealing effervescence of the youngest sample. (For more detailed tasting notes on these wines, see Charles Scicolone’s comments here.)

This is first-class winemaking, and a superb demonstration of the potential of the Glera grape (it used to be called Prosecco) in the right soils under the right hands. Several of the tasters, and Primo Franco himself, noted similarities between Glera and the great Chenin blanc wines of the Loire. There, Chenin yields wines dry and sweet, still and sparkling and capable of great age, as does Glera in Valdobbiadene.

Alas, the comparison doesn’t end there, because both varieties and regions are esteemed by experts but largely underappreciated by the general public. More makers of Primo Franco’s quality, offering more such graphic demonstrations of their wine’s greatness, should change that.